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In this episode, we continue our Lenten book study on “The Way of Trust and Love” and focus on Chapter 3: Being Reconciled to Our Weakness. We talk about how our struggles with ourselves often spill over into our relationships with others and how learning to accept our own weakness can soften our hearts towards the weakness we see in those around us. We also reflect on the tension between accepting our littleness and desiring real conversion, how we become more aware of our imperfections as we draw closer to the Lord, and the gift of community in helping us clearly see our lives. This week, we invite you to receive God’s love, extend that love to yourself, and then offer it freely to others.

In this episode, we continue our Lenten book study on “The Way of Trust and Love” and focus on Chapter 2: An Elevator for Small Children. We talk about the quiet places of discouragement, and self-reliance that keep us striving instead of surrendering. We also reflect about how radical dependence on God is not laziness, the subtle ways we resist being little before a loving Father, and how our poverty is a doorway into deeper trust. This week, we invite you to fall into the Father’s arms, allow Him to pick you up, and rest in the One who delights in you.

What would it be like to truly be free, from sin, from fear, and from anything else we can’t say no to? In the letter to the Galatians, St. Paul insists that this freedom is something we can realistically obtain through Christ. 

In this episode, Fr. Columba Jordan dives into the letter to the Galatians, exploring St. Paul’s account of the freedom Jesus promised us, revealing that with courage & love we can overcome the fears that hold us back. 

As Paul made his way toward Jerusalem, prophets warned him again and again, through the Spirit, of what awaited him: arrest. Yet Paul’s decision to go was itself made under the guidance of that same Spirit. At Tyre, the whole community—women and children included—knelt together on the beach to pray with him before he sailed. Describing this farewell, Saint Luke seems to echo Old Testament language about the daughters of Tyre, and St. Bede concludes that no city had sent the apostle on his way with greater kindness.

Further along, we meet Philip the evangelist, whose four daughters were gifted with prophecy, and a prophet named Agabus, newly arrived from Judea. Agabus did not simply speak his prophecy—he acted it out. Taking Paul’s belt, he bound his own hands and feet and declared: “Thus says the Holy Spirit: This is the way the Jews will bind the owner of this belt in Jerusalem, and they will hand him over to the Gentiles.”

This journey deliberately echoes the journey of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel—and since both books share an author, the echo is intentional, not accidental. A great structural feature of the Gospel is that ten chapters, from chapter 9 to chapter 19, are devoted to Jesus “on the way to Jerusalem,” with many of his most important teachings set within that journey. Luke portrays Jesus there as the Prophet marching toward his own death.

Now Paul does something strikingly similar. He too marches toward Jerusalem, toward arrest and being “handed over to the Gentiles”—language that recalls Jesus’ own three predictions of his passion. Prophecy after prophecy foretells Paul’s coming suffering in terms that recall the suffering of Christ himself.

“What are you doing, weeping and breaking my heart? I am prepared not only to be bound but even to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 21:13). When these prophecies came, the disciples begged Paul not to go. This was his answer. He would not let natural affection, however sincere, hold him back from bearing witness to Christ; loyalty to Jesus mattered more. Convinced this was God’s call, he continued on his way.

The scene recalls the Gospel in which Peter’s very human affection tried to hold Jesus back from his own passion, and Jesus rebuked him: “Get behind me; you are a stumbling block.” Paul, in imitation of his Master, would not let human affection stand in the way of his mission.

In the end, the community stopped pleading and simply said, “The Lord’s will be done” (Acts 21:14)—an echo of Jesus” own prayer in Gethsemane: “Not my will but yours be done.” To accept suffering, ultimately, is to accept it in that same spirit of surrender.

23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Ez 33:7-9
Second Reading: Rom 13:8-10
Gospel Reading: Mt 18:15-20

Think of some truth about which you are absolutely sure. It might be that the brakes on your car are faulty, that tobacco and other drugs harm the body, or that nutritious food and regular exercise are beneficial.

Now suppose you see someone acting, or about to act, in ignorance of this truth. Can you keep silent? If you say nothing, and the ignorance causes harm, are you not to blame for it, at least partly?

Imagine the reproaches. “You knew that the brakes were faulty, and you let me drive the car!” “You knew that drugs were addictive and harmful, and you let me experiment with them!” “You knew the importance of nutrition and exercise, and you brought me up to laze around and eat junk food!”

With this in mind, consider this Sunday’s Readings. If “you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hand,” God tells Ezekiel.

“If your brother or sister sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone,” Jesus says. “If you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you.”

He is speaking to us. Our duty to warn our neighbours about sin is part of the love we owe them.

Can we be as sure about right and wrong as we are about the truth of the examples we started with?

Yes. From the beginning, God wrote, deep in our conscience, in our “most secret core,” a law which calls us to love him and our neighbour for his sake: that is, to obey the Commandments. Inwardly, at the right moment, the law tells us to do this or shun that.

Our conscience can be “by degrees almost blinded” through sinful habits. However, God has not only implanted his law in our hearts, but also reminds us of it: first through the Ten Commandments and second through the Church.

Jesus gave his apostles the task of “promoting and preserving the faith and the moral life,” and their successors continue this task, Pope St. John Paul II said in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor (“The Splendour of Truth”). The Church, then, is “the pillar and bulwark of the truth, including the truth regarding moral action.”

However, all Christians, “by the example of their lives and the witness of their word,” have an obligation “to manifest the new man which they have put on in Baptism and to reveal the power of the Holy Spirit by whom they were strengthened at Confirmation,” says Ad Gentes (“To the Nations”).

You have an abundance of workers: stonecutters, masons, carpenters, and all kinds of artisans without number…
— 1 Chronicles 22:15

I had the pleasure of spending time with my children in the family home recently after it was heavily damaged by a broken pipe which flooded floorboards on two floors and impacted ceilings and walls. As such, I found myself doing a lot of restoration work, which led me to renovate other parts of the house, inside and out. Although I found myself putting in exhausting 8 hour days during my vacation, I actually found that I was restored from the work. 

I grew up with a father who was always building, and over the years I have loved to be in my workshop, making furniture, or repairing plumbing and wiring, re-erecting fences and more. This small interlude turned into an unexpectedly therapeutic change of pace from the office work that frames my usual workday.

In an early novel of mine, I dedicated a chapter to my father’s proclivity to build and expand our rickety family home. His default quote was always, ‘measure twice, cut once.’ We were relatively poor, and my father’s old hardware store was precariously perched on the precipice of bankruptcy. To survive, we needed to expand the building so that we could diversify what we sold, but we couldn’t afford the permits or navigate the regulations that prescribed what could or couldn’t be done to an existing building. As such, my dad would wait until the weekend, when the inspectors weren’t working, and we would build as much as we humanly could, always ensuring that whatever extension we began that weekend was ‘finished’ for all intents and purposes. Such were the rules, then, that if it was considered complete, an expansion couldn’t be removed or fined.

In my novel Flying in Silence, the scene unfolds comically. When the inspector cornered my father for building one extension, he simply called it a courtyard. “Very fashionable. We’ll have plants out here.” A month later we threw a roof over the new addition. The inspector ranted. “This is not a courtyard. It has a roof!” My father smiled patiently. “It’s a covered courtyard. Very European.” The inspector fumed. “Where’s your permit?” to which my father, rather logically I thought, responded, “Why do I need a permit? The building is finished.” The inspector always left exhausted. “It’s always finished with you. But it never stops!” 

And he was right. The small square of a store that was initially also our home, grew tentacles and limbs, swelling upward and down, a basement here, an apartment there. One year, when we ran out of timber, my father ripped out the second-story balcony.

Acts 20 finds Paul on the move, setting his face toward Jerusalem, fully aware that suffering and arrest await him there. What strikes us first, though, is not his destination but his company. Paul does not travel alone. He is surrounded by companions drawn from the very churches he had planted along his missionary journeys — a reminder that Paul’s apostolate was never a solo performance but one carried out in community, alongside fellow labourers he himself had formed. Even under the shadow of what lay ahead in Jerusalem, Paul kept the young Church’s growing custom of gathering for the Eucharist wherever he went.

That custom gives us one of the most vivid scenes in all of Acts. At Troas, the disciples gathered upstairs on the first day of the week, lamps burning, and Paul — knowing he would be leaving the next day — preached long into the night. A young man named Eutychus, seated in the window, was overcome by sleep and fell three storeys to the ground below. He was picked up dead. Paul went down, bent over him, took him in his arms, and restored him to life. Then, remarkably, Paul went back upstairs, broke bread, and continued preaching before a community now transformed from grief to joy.

Luke is a careful storyteller, and he loves to let his Gospel and Acts echo one another. An upper room, the first day of the week, the breaking of bread: this scene is built to remind us of the resurrection of Jesus himself. Even a death in the middle of the gathering could not stop the word from being preached or the bread from being broken — the two resumed as soon as they possibly could. It is worth pausing on that. When we come to Mass, we too receive both the word and the Bread of Life. Both are life-giving in themselves. But how much life we actually draw from them depends, as it did for the disciples at Troas, on the openness and disposition of our own hearts.

This passage is also one of the earliest pieces of evidence that the first Christians had already begun to set aside Sunday, rather than the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, as their day of worship — because Sunday is both the day of the Resurrection and the day of Pentecost. Interestingly, the older Jewish practice of beginning a feast the evening before never disappeared; it lives on in the Church’s own liturgical life, and remains especially vivid in the Eastern Churches, where the liturgical day traditionally begins around four in the afternoon. In many Eastern parishes, the faithful can choose between the Divine Liturgy on Sunday morning or the Vigil the evening before, sometimes called an all-night vigil.

“Love the Lord your God and love your neighbour as yourself.” 

This is pretty widely understood to be the end goal of the Christian life and, at a surface reading, it sounds pretty agreeable. What do we do when we find ourselves at the end of what used to be a fruitful and loving relationship? When we experience the pain of a falling out? The boundaries are so much harder to draw.

A good, close friend is easy to love. Loving an enemy is certainly more difficult, but if you don’t know them too well, you can abstract the enemy enough into someone you can accept in Christ. The most difficult place to love is in the person we were once close to but are no longer.

In 2022, I moved to a new city and immediately set myself to the task of trying to find a good new community. It wasn’t easy but I was lucky enough to fall into the company of a group of young Catholic men who were on fire for their faith, invested in fraternity, and generally speaking just a good time to be around. I really connected with one of these guys in particular and invited him into my life.

About a year later, some of the cracks started to show. It was clear there were ideological and theological differences, the kinds of things that seem stupid to argue about in retrospect but felt so important in the moment. It culminated in a very awkward situation, one that showed clearly which sides of the aisle we both stood on, and resulted in consequences that would be very difficult for us both to accept.

There was no dramatic breakoff point. It just became clear over time that the trust and depth and intimacy that used to be there wasn’t anymore. The relationship was broken. I forgave him and I’m sure he forgave me too; but things were still weird.

In the Christian world, it’s become almost a cliche at this point to state that forgiveness and reconciliation aren’t the same thing. That you can release someone from the bitterness and anger in your heart without rebuilding the friendship to be exactly where it was before. It’s a helpful distinction; but it breaks down when we try to figure out how we’re going to live when we’re still in each others’ lives. I didn’t cut myself off from my friend and he didn’t cut himself off from me either. We were in the same community, often attending Masses in the same Parish. We were going to have to live here with one another. How could we find peace with that?

It was a sunny, pleasant Saturday on the second of November. I found myself in a graveyard, leaning my wet cheek against the jacketed shoulder of Nathan, my fiancé of two months. Tears were spilling out of my eyes, and my heart ached, though I had never met the woman whose grave we were looking at. It was All Souls Day, a day in the Catholic Church (November 2nd, the day after All Saints Day) where we remember the dead and pray for their souls. We decided to visit the gravesite of Nathan’s late Oma, who passed away during Nathan’s high school years. As we stood and looked at her burial place, a surprising depth of emotion welled in my heart. Although I felt empathetic to what Nathan might be feeling, I also related some of this emotion to unprocessed grief from the death of my long-distance grandmother just the year before, whose grave I had yet to see.

The gentle tears soon changed into heavy chest sobs that were begging to be released. I took a moment to sit alone in the car and pray. I realized, as I processed, that I have felt this particular ache before. It has shown up when I have sat and listened to the story of a parent who had suddenly lost their child in an accident, or when I’ve looked after cancer patients who were fighting for more time with their children. I’ve also experienced this gut-wrenching pang after helping patients whose babies have tragically died in their wombs.

This ache of witnessing death and grief always produces a refrain in my heart over and over: we were not made for this.

And friends, this is true.

We were not made for death.

Death, separation from God, was a direct result of the fall of Adam and Eve, of humanity choosing sin over relationship.

“Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned” Romans 5:12

Last year I was working through some grief in a particular sorrowful mystery of my life. When I brought my heart to the Lord and asked Him, “if you love me, why would you let this happen when you know how much it means to me?” I felt Him whispering “remember My character”. The purpose of Jesus coming to earth was to enable a path for us to live eternally, with Him. Our God is not a God of death, but of life. That’s who He is. That is His character. He is the God of sunsets, fresh flowers, babies, warm soup, laughter, intimacy, and so much more.

This past summer, my family found ourselves in that familiar late-May whirlwind. My husband and I are both educators, and that whirlwind included final grades, forgotten lunchboxes, back-to-back recitals, parish festivals, Scout meetings, and overlapping calendar invites. And while the liturgical calendar forms our spiritual lives, I admit it’s the school calendar that sets the tempo of our days. My entire family feels scattered — emotionally, spiritually, even physically. Some weeks, it seems like the four of us barely see each other in the same room.

We desperately needed something to pull us back together.

One Sunday evening, we started small. We sat on the couch, lit a candle, and opened some little journals I’d picked up. My husband and I offered a few simple prompts, and we each wrote our answers: What were your roses this week? What were your thorns? Where did you see God? How do you wish you had acted better? What would you like to change in the week ahead?

Then we ended with a prayer. Sometimes an Our Father, a Hail Mary, or a Glory Be. Sometimes one of our kids recites a Bible verse they’ve been memorizing. We offer up our hopes and ask: How might we change, appreciate more, and do better next week? We called this practice our “End-of-School Examen.” It wasn’t planned as a long-term ritual — just a much-needed pause amid the end-of-year storm. But it gave us space to reflect, reconnect, and remember what matters. And it helped us start noticing where God had been all along. He had always been there with us in the whispers before school music recitals, in those rare teamwork moments of cleaning up spilled juice at breakfast together, and, most importantly, in the here and now tired joy of our family finally all in the same room at the same time, taking the time to be together and be with God, too.

As summer settled in, the Examen naturally slipped away. Our evenings slowed. We had more time to connect in other ways — swimming in the neighborhood pool, playing Crazy Eights at the kitchen table, simply being together. But as the new school year crept closer, that old familiar tension returned: How would we carry the peace of summer into the storm of the school year?

There was so much to do: back-to-school bashes. Music lessons. Meet-the-teacher nights. Religious education signups. Everything was revving back up again. And I found myself wondering: Would the rhythms of the academic calendar drown out the rhythms of the Spirit? So, in these past few weeks, we brought back our Examen — with a new purpose.